Masahiro Sakurai

When it comes to video game tournaments, GameStop is one of the few companies capable of holding nationwide contests. They’ve done it for Super Smash Bros Brawl, Street Fighter IV and other titles. Beginning March 8, the video game retailer is doing it again with a Kid Icarus: Uprising multiplayer tournament sponsored by Nintendo.

Players will compete in four regional bracket-style tournaments in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Orlando, Fla.; and New York. The top contenders will head to the Big Apple for the finals. But before all of that goes down, I actually had a chance to play both the free-for-all and light-versus-dark modes last week and came away with a good sense of how the matches will go.

In a few hours with the game, I gleaned some insight in what to expect and what to look out for when playing others via ad hoc or online mode. Here are a few quick tips to prepare competitors thinking about entering the tournament.

Making the sequel to Kid Icarus is one of the most daunting tasks in gaming. A developer is tossed the keys to one of Nintendo’s beloved characters from the fabled 1980s era and the team has to create a game that not only lives up to the original (or at least our memories of it) but offers a new gameplay experience as well.

That dual demand of nostalgia and expectation can be crushing. Add in the fact that there hasn’t been a new Kid Icarus game since 1991 and the degree of difficulty is off the charts. It’s a strange position to be in — reimagining a series that’s gone nearly 21 years without an update.

But that’s the job Project Sora chief Masahiro Sakurai and his team took on. The man better known for the Nintendo’s fighting game series already did part of the work. For Super Smash Bros. Brawl, he and his studio designed a modern day version of Pit, the original game’s protagonists, pulling out details from the pixely 8-bit version and adding new accoutrements to a hero finally done in polygons.